My time with rescue dogs

I let Scrappy down today

I didn’t trust what he was telling me. Perhaps it would be better to say that I didn’t trust my first interpretation of what he was telling me.

Scrappy is one of our best dog testers. When meeting new dogs he is calm and doesn’t usually react badly if the other dog dog is unsure of herself or behaves a bit rudely. He also doesn’t push himself on a new dog. Well, to be honest, he can be somewhat too thorough in the olfactory examination — if you know what I mean.

Today we paired him up with a girl that had an issue during her first dog test. She was doing fine until the end when there was little dustup. Such incidents aren’t terribly unusual so we wanted to give her another opportunity to show her sociable side.

We brought them together in a yard and circled around each other while we humans still held on to the leashes.No sparks flew as we got closer together and we thought it was going well. Until we noticed that Scrappy was hanging back a little and didn’t appear eager to get close to the other dog.

I studied his face for a minute. I wondered if he were feeling poorly. Or maybe he was just tired of a being a dog tester. I purposely limit the number of times he helps us test for that very reason. We meandered about for another few minutes. “Okay, let’s drop the leashes.”

Almost as soon as she had an opportunity, the other dog struck at Scrappy and grabbed hold of his ear. This is exactly why we drop the leashes but leave them attached to the dogs. We managed to get them apart but it took some effort. Despite all the sound and fury I wasn’t panicked that Scrappy might be seriously hurt. These clashes generally sound much worse than they are. In fact, it wasn’t until my 2nd inspection that I found a small abrasion under Scrappy’s ear. He’ll make it. But he did look disappointed when I told him it wouldn’t leave a scar.

So Scrappy gets a frozen Kong and about a 1000 apologies tonight. I told him that I was wrong, and he was right. And that I will always trust him from here on out.

We are always surprised that, as sociable as Ray has become with other dogs, every now and then he surprises us. Why are we surprised? I really don’t know because, every now and then I meet somebody who I am not comfortable with! Why would I expect Ray to be any different with dogs? 🙂